We Are Not Removed from Our Process

Excerpts from Larry Sultan’s posthumous selected writings, ‘Water over Thunder,’ offer a new lens on his artistic process, sense of place, and pedagogy.

By Asha Schechter, Larry SultanFebruary 21, 2026

• Art & Architecture

THE LARRY SULTAN QUOTE I quote most to my photography students does not appear in Water over Thunder, a new collection of his writings, mostly drawn from his journals. In a 1990 BOMB interview, he said, “[N]o one believes in photographs, right? We’re much too sophisticated. Yet, in fact, we do. There’s always a photograph that will wound us still, that will […] make us feel something painful or embarrassing. It’s because of the intimacy of photographs.” This is the conflict of the photograph that Larry worked with his whole career: its power to determine our sense of reality, no matter how much we know it’s not real.

Like so many others, I studied with Larry at the soon-closing California College of the Arts in the Bay Area. He was a dedicated teacher, and many of his students went on to be artists and professors themselves. I vividly remember showing him my (very embarrassing) application portfolio, and him carefully inspecting each photograph. In those moments, he made me feel it was actually possible that I could be an artist, not with praise, but with thoughtful attention. He took his students seriously as peers, rather than taking the position of the master, a vulnerable thing for an established artist. This generosity and openness appear over and over in these texts.

Larry’s career arc was the opposite of many artists of his generation; he moved from conceptual, often collaborative work, using existing imagery and mass media, to intimate, emotional work dealing with his own life. This isn’t to say he became sentimental, but that he brought the rigor of his conceptual projects to bear upon more personal work. In a text from Larry’s masterpiece, Pictures from Home (1992), in which he photographed his parents and their environs in Southern California, he explains how they dealt with being photographed, including their skepticism of the implications of his depictions of them. This willingness to negate the narrative power of his own photographs is what makes Larry’s work richer than that of others working in a similar way and intertwines it with his frequent questions about masculinity. The archetypal Male Photographer would never allow weakness into his work; Larry did, and this imbues his pictures with a rare mix of tenderness and complexity.

In class, I remember Larry wondering whether it was possible to make a good picture of somebody drinking a glass of water, an action with no inherent drama or meaning. This came to mind when reading his description of working on The Valley (2004), looking at the off-camera moments on porn sets:

My photographs reference the artifice of pornography, but they also capture real people in their own genuine moments. For example, a man is shown standing in the kitchen, looking out the window. He happens not to have any clothes on, but for me, that picture recalls a really poignant moment where, in the middle of the day you have a cold glass of water and you look out the window and wonder, what am I doing here?

Excerpted here is text Larry wrote while working on Homeland, a project he was in the middle of when he died in 2009. He could’ve played it safe and continued photographing his family, turned the lens toward his sons and made an inversion of Pictures from Home. But Homeland was a very different kind of project: he hired day laborers to pose in landscape photographs. When he told me about it, I suggested he look for subjects at a work center in Graton, near my California hometown. He described the anxiety he experienced, not knowing quite how to approach the men he wanted to make pictures of, uncertain of the dynamics at play. He took on this challenge as part of the work.

—Asha Schechter

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For the past two years, I have been hiring day laborers as actors in the landscape photographs I make on the outskirts of the suburbs. I drive to lumberyards and big-box hardware stores where, every day, from dawn to early evening, hundreds of men wait nearby to be picked up for hourly work. They gather in small groups on the edge of a vacant lot or sit on the grassy verge at the freeway entrance. The men come here to work, often for four or five years, before returning home to their wives and sisters, mothers, and children. They occupy landscapes which are the marginal spaces and transitional zones invisible to most of us.

I’m not sure if there is a specific term for these places. They are deeply reminiscent of the terrain I sought out as a child: the empty fields behind malls and scruffy borderlands of the L.A. River that ran behind my house in the San Fernando Valley. These places represented a small and vanishing patch of paradise that existed just outside of the boundaries of property and ownership; a free zone that eased my (adolescent) uncertainty and provided a safe place away from the judgments of others. I direct these men’s actions and gestures while drawing from multiple sources: an amalgam of my own childhood wanderings in this landscape as well as interpretations of their experiences as exiles. The resulting dramas are small and mundane in nature: carrying food to a potluck, stringing lights on a tree, or walking to a waiting car. They are routines and rituals related to place and domesticity, alluding to the poignancy of displacement and the longing for home.

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To be a photographer means, for me, that you have to look. And if you name things too quickly—if you know what they mean or name them—you don’t look as long. Everything is suspended, in the sense of all of these objects, whether it’s a piece of pie on a table or a Kleenex or a glove, they all become not ordinary objects. They’re part of a potential narrative. And the pleasure of looking is why I do what I do. Because there’s an openness that one gets to have when you just look without trying to make so much meaning that it excludes the viewer. It is a suspension of names almost in the same way that to listen to music you need to let go and hear in a deeper way. It’s why I’m an artist, I think. When I was working on the portfolio, specific prints really jumped out as being jewel-like in tones and colors. This makes me very happy since one of the inspirational sources of my work is the painting of Thomas Kinkade, a reactionary American artist famous for his kitsch paintings of the idyllic (Christian) settings of gardens, streams, ponds, etc. He is very much like the painter Norman Rockwell—and by borrowing the palette of this particular version of the “picturesque,” I hoped to create a strange tension between the real and the ideal.

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Even though I moved away from the San Fernando Valley when I was 17, I am continuously drawn back there photographically. Even now, I’m photographing in landscapes that are very familiar, where I used to play as a kid. In that sense, the landscape of my childhood and what has to stand for the staging ground American dream intersect and allow me to explore both.

When I went elsewhere to shoot, I worked with a very clear intensity and no other obligations. My ordinary life was suspended. Now all my pictures are made within 10 miles from my house. It’s hard to work at home. There’s no clear boundary, especially when you have a family. When do you go to work? The light may be best at seven o’clock, but I have open house at my son’s school, or I have to teach, or I have to take my dogs out …

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Can a photograph also indicate something much more basic, something irreducible, like Roland Barthes was speaking about in the photographs of his mother?

My notion of personality, of identity, of self, is grounded in time, but we are not removed from our process. We perhaps get the face we deserve after many years, but the point is that if I take an image of my father, it stands for that person, it brands them. And unless one has a deep understanding of that person, that image becomes a signature. But we’re much more than one set of qualities; we’re very complex. This raises the issue about a static image of the self, as opposed to a very temporal process of one. Another idea or problem I have with portraiture is the notion that personality is fixed, that along with that static image, I think our personalities exist in relationship.

I know I change all the time. I change in context, depending on whom I’m with, what situation I’m in, and there’s a real difficulty about a portrait, again, not indicating the range of what the personality is. I’m talking about not necessarily art photographs, but all photographs of people and what they do to our notions of self.

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For me, art-making is a means of exploring and articulating the complexities, contradictions, and wonders of being alive. I believe that art education, at its best, is based on the assumption and commitment that art-making engenders a way of thinking, an aesthetic intelligence. Shaped by specific material, technology, and, most important, the individual experience of the artist, this intelligence is the capacity to perceive and create new relationships between oneself and the world. As a teacher, I try to create a climate which encourages and provokes this exploration.

At the heart of it, I feel that making art and teaching art offer the same challenge: to engage in an authentic activity, and to reach deep beyond art-world myths and academic structures in order to express human needs and dreams. The discipline of photography has been a great teacher for me. I have had to learn patience, perseverance, and some self-control. The most difficult lesson, and one that I am continually learning, is to have faith in myself in spite of doubt and confusion. I am at the point in my life where I love this difficulty. It keeps me alive and thinking.

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Larry Sultan’s Water over Thunder: Selected Writings is out this month. Excerpt courtesy of MACK.